At Aave Labs, we originally built Aave to serve lending at global scale, and today we're taking a significant step forward in that mission with the launch of Aave V4 on Ethereum mainnet.
In the years since V1, Aave has processed over one trillion dollars in cumulative loans and holds over 50% of the decentralized lending market, operating without issue through every major stress event in DeFi's history.
The onchain lending market that made Aave's success possible is large, and growing, but it still represents less than 0.1% of global financial assets. There is a lot of ground to cover, and V4 is the architecture we built to cover it.
What is Aave V4?
The foundational change introduced by Aave V4 is its Hub and Spoke architecture. A Liquidity Hub holds assets centrally, and Spokes connect to it with their own collateral types, risk parameters, and liquidation rules. When a user supplies through a Spoke, their capital enters the Hub and becomes available to every Spoke connected to it. When a borrower draws capital, the funds come from that shared Hub.
This means a unified pool of capital can serve many distinct lending environments simultaneously. A conservative institutional market, an ETH liquid staking e-Mode, and a dedicated environment for Ethena users can all draw liquidity from the same pool without any of them needing an independent supplier base.
For builders, launching a specialized lending market on V4 means inheriting Aave's existing liquidity from day one rather than sourcing deposits from scratch.
V4 also introduces several significant changes to how the protocol prices risk, handles liquidations, and allows governance to update parameters. We won't cover all these features here, since we've published quite a few breakdowns over the past year. If you want to go deeper, the posts below can get you up to speed:
- Understanding Aave V4's Architecture
- Aave V4 Risk Premiums
- Aave V4 and the Unified Liquidity Thesis
- Aave V4's New Liquidation Engine
- How Aave V4 Handles Risk Isolation
What's Live Today?
V4 launches on Ethereum mainnet with three Liquidity Hubs. If you have used Aave V3, the experience of supplying and borrowing assets will feel familiar, and any changes due to the new architecture are simplified via Aave Pro.
Aave Pro is Aave V4's dedicated user interface that surfaces all Hubs and Spokes in one place, shows you current assets, rates, and makes it easy to find the right market for what you are trying to do. You do not need to understand the full architecture to use the protocol.
The Core Hub is home to the most assets and Spokes and serves as the default liquidity and routing venue.
The e-Mode Spokes are for users who hold a price-correlated token and want to borrow the asset it tracks. Because the collateral and borrowed asset move closely together in price, the protocol can offer better borrowing power.
The Prime Hub is designed for suppliers seeking a more controlled collateral posture. Note, borrowable tokens with the "core" prefix are credit lines from the Core Hub, and tokens drawn from other Hubs will have an appropriate prefix.
The Plus Hub is designed for strategy-heavy stablecoin activity that should scale behind its own caps.
All three Hubs launch with conservative supply and borrow caps. This is 100% intentional as we take a security-first approach to scaling up Aave V4's deposit base. The Aave DAO will increase these caps as it observes live behavior in production. If you'd like to see the exact parameters for each Hub, Spoke, and asset you can view the activation proposal here.
What is Aave Pro?
Aave Pro is built specifically for V4 and designed for DeFi-native and power users who want full access to the new market structure. While it has pro in the name, it's freely accessible for users.
The UI surfaces all assets, Hubs, and their Spokes. It supports supplying and borrowing across Hubs and Spokes from a unified account view, and shows the risk premium, health factor, and rate information you need to manage positions effectively. In the near future, we'll continue introducing new features to Aave Pro that make using Aave easier than ever.
For a full walkthrough of how to use Aave Pro, see our guide here. If you have any questions or feedback, please join the Discord.
Aave V4 Security
Security is our number one priority. Aave V4 underwent approximately 345 cumulative days of security review. The program involved four audit firms, four independent security researchers, and a six-week public contest on Sherlock with over 900 verified participants.
The protocol also underwent numerous audits, and published reports from Trail of Bits, Blackthorn, and ChainSecurity are available in the V4 repository at github.com/aave/aave-v4/tree/main/audits.
We also built Aave V4 from the ground up with security in mind. Certora worked side-by-side with the Aave Labs engineering team on early-stage architectural reviews, threat modeling, and continuous formal verification. You can read about that process here.
What's Next?
V4 launches today with a deliberate set of initial markets, conservative caps, and a governance structure designed to scale responsibly. The Aave DAO will expand supply and borrow caps, add new Spokes, and bring V4 to additional networks as the protocol proves itself in production.
If you want to follow along as V4 grows, the governance forum is where cap increases, new Spoke proposals, and network expansions are discussed and voted on.
If you're a builder wanting to learn more, you can find Aave V4's documentation here and the codebase here.